Halt,
who goes there?

Last week, the virtual world Second Life was contending with a rogue program called CopyBot that copies all it touches. This week, parent company Linden Lab is fighting back against spinning gold rings that damage the computers of those who touch them with their avatars reports paidContent.org.

Sunday the official Second Life blog reported, "An attack of self-replicators is causing heavy load on the database, which is in turn slowing down in-world activity. We have isolated the grey goo and are currently cleaning up the grid. We'll keep you updated as status changes."

As a Slashdot reader wrote, "Linden Lab had to invoke martial law and lock out all logins by users except their staff as they began the task of cleaning the servers of what they began to term 'the grey goo,'" which was removed within the hour.

Second Life's popularity has made it a tempting target for troublemakers and worse. Which just goes to show, even a virtual world can't fully escape the reality of human nature.